Special Commemorative Edition : The N ight of The ‘Murdered Poets a August 12, 1952. «4 on this very day we tightly lock ‘up our Jament and.our 2 pain. ‘pain in our ‘hearts, -Jamnent twixt-our ‘teeth ..August 12, 1952 The Night of The Murdered Poets Revised Edition Edited and Compiled by Carol R. Saivetz Sheila Levin Woods with a Foreword by Meyer Levin National Conference on Soviet Jewry If West 42nd St., N.Y.C., N.Y. 10036Joseph Kerler was personally acquainted with the Jewish intellectuals killed on August 12, 1952. He now makes his home in Israel. (c) 1972, 1973 National Conference on Soviet Jewry This pamphlet may not be reproduced in part or in its entirety without the written permission of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-85751 FIGC2 CONTENTS Foreword Meyer Levin 2... eee ec eee teen ee eee e ees v Chaim Grade “‘Blegy for the Soviet Yiddish Writers” ..........-2+05 I The Night Of The Murdered Poets ............... 5 Itzik Feffer STAMASOW” vee e eee cece cece ee eens 13 David Hofshteyn “Poem” “Sabbath isGone” . . Leyb Kvitko “Day Grows Datker” . 20 » 22 Peretz Markish “Poem”... 6+ “Sh. Mikhoels” “Brother Jews” 6... cece cece cece ete eee 29 David Markish “Let My People Go” “A Citizen of the World” Bibliography 2.0.0.0... eee cece ee cee ee eee 34The editors wish to express their gratitude to Jerry Goodman, Executive Director of the NCSJ, whose guidance and counsel are an integral part of this pamphlet. We gratefully acknowledge the invaluable contribution of Joel J. Sprayregen of Chicago. Mr. Sprayregen devoted extensive time and energy in the research, preparation and writing of “The Night of the Murdered Poets.” We are indebted to Mr. Moshe Decter for reviewing the essay and for the addition of his scholarly comments and to Professor Thomas Bird of Queens College for his help, particularly in the preparation of the biographical sketches of the poets, and for the translation of “Lam a Jew,” which appears in this pamphlet for the first time. We appreciate the time and effort Professor Maurice Friedberg of Indiana University and Professor Herbert Paper of the University of Michigan gave to this Project. ‘We would like to thank Holt, Rinchart and Winston, Inc. for permission to int “Elegy for the Soviet Yiddish Writers” by Chaim Grade, “Poem” and “Sabbath is Gone” by David Hofstein, and “Poem” by Peretz Markish from A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, copyright (c) 1969 by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg. We wish to thank Zeesy Markowitz for her assistance in translating source matorial from Yiddish to Engtish. The final responsibility for this pamphlet rests with the editors and with the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. CRS, S.LW. FOREWORD One day, a decade ago, I sat waiting my turn at the speakers table in a New York hotel meeting hall where a Jewish labor convention was taking place. 1 was pleased to have been thought of, yet a touch uncomfortable because life had carried me out of this milieu. Here in the haH were delegates with Yiddish newspapers stuck in their coat pockets, and I heard around me the accents of my uncles, my father. But still I reassured myself, I had never turned away. And though English was our language, here I wrote of Jews; I had confronted the Holocaust and Israel was part of my pattern, Then, just before I was to speak, the chairman asked the delegates to rise for a memorial. And as they stood, he read out a list of names of Jewish authors who had been executed in the Soviet Union. Now and then a name resounded to me; I had somewhere heard it, in Europe or in Israel it had come through to me, Peretz Markish, I had heard, David Bergelson, Itzik Feffer .. . but their works were unknown to me. Yiddish poetry, I had not followed. But it was not my ignorance of their work that came into question, good work would live, and it has; it was my ignorance of their destruction that startled me. Two of the names evoked particular murmurs in the hall; these men had been here in New York, travelled in America, sent during the war by the Soviet Union in a special Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee: Solomon Mikhoels, director of Moscow’s Jewish State Theater, and Itzik Feffer, good communist poet. Many of the men in this hall had grasped their hands, But how was it that I had not heard of their “liquidation”? That the world had not heard of it? In our newspapers, in our news magazines, had there been mention of this massacre? We had heard of the “Doctors Plot,” yes, and heard in general about Stalin’s anti-Jewish measures, of arrests and exiles, the closing down of Jewish institutions, schools, publications, of cultural strangulation, but how had this enormity, the mass execution of the leading Jewish poets and novelists escaped world attention?It may be that research will prove that the fact was indced reported here and there; just as in the research on the Holocaust, it can be shown that reports of a sort were made: “we did know”. But we could not accept, and doubted, and held away the horror as long as we might, out of fear of having to confront an inadmissible human capacity for evil. So too we — particularly we writers — have held off from absorbing this explicit event; from knowing that there took place a massacre of writers, of Jewish writers, and in the first land of the great social revolution. Even up to today, this story of the Holocaust of Russian Jewish authors remains virtually untold. True, their death was signalized in grief by their readers, the sadly dwindling world of readers of Yiddish, and here in this modest booklet it has been told to the English reading world. Over the past year, five thousand copies were disseminated. But the embers show life, a new wind blows, and now the booklet will be published again, in a larger edition. Only as a remembrance? Fitting and needed as that may be, this is more than a memorial; it is a continuation, A living continuation, for ‘one of the most highly gifted of these murdered poets, is exemplified here in the work of his son, David Markish, now at last in Israel. He is one of that incredibly courageous band of Russian Jews who have proven to the whole wosld that resistance is possible, is alive, and can succeed even in a police state. There occurs this remarkable passage in the diary of Anne Frank: Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God who has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again, If we bear ali this suffering and if there are still Jews left when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held ‘up as an example. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason alone do we suffer now. We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or just representatives of any other country for that matter, we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too. In their mass death, these massacred Jewish poets, these inextinguishable souls, sent us their last alert. What we must do in unity with them is to heed it, not to shrink away in horror, but to spread this alert, and wherever the Jewish self, the human self, is threatened, to react, with all the strength of the living, and yes, the living dead. New York, June, 1973 ~ Meyer Levin viiCHAIM GRADE ELEGY FOR THE SOVIET YIDDISH WRITERS {Excerpts} I weep for you with all the letters of the alphabet that made your hopeful songs. I saw how reason spent itself in vain for hope, how you strove against regret— and all the while your hearts were rent to bits, like ragged prayer books. Wanderer, I slept in your beds, knew you as liberal hosts; yet every night heard sighs of ancient ghosts: Jews converted by force. My memory kept it all, your hospitality, and all that Russian land that fed me, broad as its plains and confining as a cell, with its songs on the Volga, and the anchor sunk in sand; homelands all gone down in blood. And so I tell your merits, have always looked to your defense, not to justify for pity of your deaths, but for what you were when all the space of Russia sustained you still, and you lived your deathly lie: Marranos—your deepest self denies your face. 1 saw you, stunned and dumb, Yiddish poets of Minsk, Moscow, Kiev, when they brought home Job’s heavy hurt, the few whom fate had spared. Agonized, you saw the credo you had catechized in holy Hebrew—Ani m'amin b'emunah shlomah—fall dead in the ravine at Kiev, among the hidden slain: “With full faith I betieve. in Friendship of Peoples!” —faith even faith could not retrieve from Babi Yar,“Are you asleep?” David Bergelson came to me in the night: “No sleep for me, Chaim. My bed is all nails from fright of what we hoped for—the New Enlightened Man! And J have lived to know him in my own life’s span.” I can see his noose hanging down like lead, and his canny eyes, quick to find, From the way he bites on the knot of his thoughts with teeth set askew in his head E can tell no one knows better the maze of his mind. Mikhoels, tragedian of Tevye and King Lear! The milkman’s faith, the king’s despair— your very fingers speak the lines, while double-dealing fate plays on. They call you Solomon, and Moscow crowns you King. I myself would rather shun Mikhoels; I fear nothing in him throbs. for Solomon's Song, or Israel's sobs. But one New Year's night when a blizzard beat, and partied and vodka’d all Moscow went mad, and both of us drunk we pitched through the sleet, he groaned out the grief that stuck in his blood: “T play the King with my hands, Susskin the Fool witti his feet. The audience knows no Yiddish; we bleat to an ignorant hall.” The nation trembled at his death when tyranny snuffed the guiltless breath. Smelling of summer, a stag with belly sated, charming as a child, Kvitko smiled and prated. But Bergelson bellowed, “A third eye’s what you'll need for alt the tears you’ve yet to lose if you run away, Chaim—you’ll only run to weep! Feffer gave his creed with outstreched arm: “The days of the trials are done.” Posters on walls could thrill us then—but he forgot the walls of the cellars where the prisoners were shot, The day of his trial—let me be mute: praise God I wasn't there. I feel my own head crack with the bullet aimed at Colonel Itzik Feffer's back in cold murder. Hard for me to speak of him, and then hard not to. Still tet me deliver his name from evil repute. Ani ha-gever! fam the man!—When we met to remember the slain I saw his tear, and heard his hallowed Amen. Peretz Markish flies into my room with the storm, flies out again with the lightening’s flare, his grave grown scant for his giant’s form, his arms spread wide with wing-like whirr. Stormy poet, enchanting silhouette, how the style of your step bewitched! But when you ranted a great bird twitched, and your poems were rant caught up in a net, thickets of words, You boomed like a wind, all gusto and gladness—Why does everyone fret?” The storm in your song was thinned for the doomed Siberian dead. “Am free, am free, am free!” you said; wild as your poems, you shook out your wild hair. Already the rifle was cocked to tear Apollo’s wreathed and lovely head.Ghosts justify my despair, phantom faces smile their lost mute shame. Through nights of fever and dream you razed your palaces to glimmering ruin. In your poems you were like a pond—crooked mirror for the world of truth, The young have forgotten you and me and the hour of our grief. Your widows receive their dower of blood money. But your darkly murdered tongue, silenced by the hangman’s noose, is no longer heard, though the e muse in sings in the land. You | we your language, lifted with joy. But ob, I am bereft— I wear your Yiddish like a drowned man's shirt, ‘wearing out the hurt. translated by Cynthia Ozick THE NIGHT OF THE MURDERED POETS On the night of August 12, 1952, twenty-four leading Jewish poets, writers and intellectual public figures were executed in the basement of Moscow’s notorious Lubianka Prison, These were not random executions, but the culmination of a calculated campaign to eradicate Jewish life in the Soviet Union. The paradox of the August 12th massacre is clear: Poetry is, by its very nature, immortal.-Once a poet has committed his words to paper, or whispered them to another, he has secured a place for his ideas, his beliefs and his convictions. A bullet cannot kill a poem, any more than it can murder a philosophy. In his despair for the murdered poets, Chaim Grade, their wartime comrade, wrote “The young have forgotten you and me and the hour of our grief . . . your darkly murdered tongue, silenced by a hangman’s noose is no longer heard . . . ’ That poetic prophecy, written after the execution of the 24 writers, must not be allowed to be fulfilied. The repercussions of August 12th, and of the entire 1948-1953 period, when the Soviet Government effectively demolished the remnants of the Jewish communi- ty, provoked Soviet Jews to fight to retain their Jewish identity. In the void created by the destruction of Jewish life, the Soviet Government did not take into account the determined and obdurate nature of the Jewish people. When the war was over, two million Soviet Jews had perished. The Nazis had found in the Soviet Jews the synthesis of all they despised and feared, The “Jewish Bolshevik” became a prime target of the full force of Nazi propaganda and war machinery. The three million surviving Jews were physically and psychologically depleted. With their relatives dead and their towns destroyed, Jews returned home to encounter more anti- Semitism.This resurgence of popular anti-Semitism left Russian Jews with little more than their inherent will to survive, It was in this atmosphere that Soviet Jews began to rebuild their lives. But they had hardly any time before the Cold War, with its attendant suspicions and tensions, evolved. The Cold War engendered in the Soviet Union a fear of anything Western and a concomitant attempt to prove that things Soviet and Russian were best. The Soviet campaign against “rootless cosmopolitanism” was a natural outgrowth of this new perspective. At first, the campaign was directed at all those whose outlook and preferences were for Western and international ideas. However, as the propaganda became more extensive, anti-Jewish sentiments emerged. Soviet authorities saw the trait of “‘cosmopolitanism” as a contemptible Jewish attribute. The scene was set for the period that came to be known as the “Black Years” —1948-1953, with the purges and repressions which would follow. Jewish communal and religious institutions had been destroyed long before the War. In 1942, the Soviet Government organized the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to enlist wartime support from Jews in the West, The Yiddish writers and artists selected by Stalin to lead the Committee became victims of the terror of the black years. Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Moscow Yiddish State Theater and an actor whose characterizations of King Lear and Tevye were legendary, had been named chairman of the Committee. The writers who joined with Mikhoels in the work of the Committee had from the early days of the Soviet State joined wholeheartedly in the seemingly messianic work of building a new social order. Several had left in the wake of the pograms and upheavals of the revolutionary period, but returned voluntarily as the new Soviet Government restored order. Many Soviet Yiddish writers communicated the Com- munist message to the hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews whose mother tongue was Yiddish. ‘ In time, due to the absence of other Jewish institutions during the traumatic wartime period, Soviet Jews came to look upon the Committee as the symbol of Jewish consciousness in the U.S.S.R. Under the impact of shattering wartime experience, the writers began to employ Jewish historical and religious themes, The struggle of Soviet Jews against the Nazis was portrayed in terms of the tradition of the Jewish will to survive against powerful oppressors. The public meetings of the Committee and the pages, as well as the very title of its Journal, Eynikayt (Unity), provided a forum for expression of Jewish sentiments, emphasizing the unity of Soviet Jews with world Jewry, which would have been considered unthinkable before the war, Mikhoels addressed “Brother Jews” throughout the world. Peretz Markish said,‘“We are one people, and now we are becoming one army.” Colonel Itzik Feffer recalled Ezekiel’s vision of a mighty nation arising from the valley of dry bones. A Committee manifesto was addressed to “our Jewish brethren the world over.” Mikhoels and Feffer were dispatched on an official mission to the United States. They were heard in many different cities by about half a million Jews, urging and receiving moral and financial support for the Soviet war effort, and promising that “firm brotherly relations” would persist among Jews throughout the world after the war, More than three million dollars was collected in the United States. Ata postwar memorial ceremony in honor of Polish Jews, Markish corrected Feffer—who had spoken of “‘the friendship of the Jewish peoples” —with these words: “There are not two Jewish peoples. The Jewish nation is one. Just as a heart cannot be cut up and divided, similarly one cannot split up the Jewish people into Polish Jews and Russian Jews, Everywhere, we are and shall remain one entity.” Soviet Jews, hearing such expressions from Committee members, turned to the Committee for assistance with many kinds of problems, particularly those of refugees and evacuees. Ilya Ehrenberg, the assimilated Jewish writer who wrote in Russian and frequently served, in the postwar period, as a spokesman for Stalin’s strictures against Jewish nationalism, recalled in his memoirs: “After the victory, thousands of people went to Mikhoels for help because they saw him as the wise rabbi, the defender of the oppressed.” Mikhoels as one of the leading creative Jewish personalities of the era was among the first to sound the anguished alarm of “solidarity,” He called for the united front of all Jews in the face of total annihilation, in the